RIM Responds to Apple's ‘Distortion Field’ — For those of us who live outside of Apple's distortion field, we know that 7" tablets will actually be a big portion of the market and we know that Adobe Flash support actually matters to customers who want a real web experience.

What is Steve Jobs so afraid of? — There's a saying that the more you have, the more you fear losing it. — Apple's CEO made a surprise appearance during yesterday's fiscal 2010 fourth quarter earnings call. Jobs said he couldn't resist participating, given Apple's record $20.34 billion revenue.

webOS 2.0 review — When it comes to webOS 2.0 (now actually called HP webOS), it almost felt like we'd never see the version number, let alone get to review it. It's been an intense few months for Palm: after floundering in the early part of the smartphone wars, it was scooped up by HP for a tidy sum of $1.2b.

Bartz On Blogging: “An Extremely Hard Engineering Feat” — Carol Bartz was almost subdued on today's earnings call. Missing were the salty outbursts of previous conference calls, but she did manage one zinger. Apparently, one of Yahoo's problems before was an inflexible content management system …

ATD Welcomes Ina Fried As Our New Mobile Reporter — Here at All Things Digital, we've always prided ourselves on our journalism efforts, while also fully embracing the fast-paced new world of blogging. — So, we could not be more thrilled to announce the hiring of Ina Fried as our new reporter …

First Look: Starbucks Digital Network Is Here — Beginning Wednesday, Starbucks customers who use the free Wi-Fi at more than 6,800 U.S. company-operated stores will be greeted with the Starbucks Digital Network (SDN) — an exclusive content network curated by the company and designed to enhance the customer's in-store experience.

Google ditches all Street View Wi-Fi scanning — Google has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the location of Wi-Fi networks, a practice that led to a flurry of privacy probes after the company said it unintentionally captured fragments of unencrypted data.

Porn studio a step closer to revealing pirates' IDs — Few film companies are assailing piracy with the vigor of Third World Media. — Third World Media (TMW), a porn studio headquartered north of Los Angeles, filed a lawsuit two weeks ago against 1,568 unnamed individuals …

Prototype of an Open Web App Ecosystem — The open Web is a great platform for rich applications. It would be even better if it had additional capabilities to ease discovery, acquisition, installation and use of apps, while also enabling monetization for developers.

Google adds shared by number to Google news results — Google seems to be experimenting with adding a “Shared by [number]” stat next to Google News results - so you can see how popular each story is on Twitter etc. Here's a screenshot - you can see “Shared by 5+” next to the news source:

The New Funding Landscape — After barely changing at all for decades, the startup funding business is now in what could, at least by comparison, be called turmoil. At Y Combinator we've seen dramatic changes in the funding environment for startups. Fortunately one of them is much higher valuations.

Verizon Wireless to Offer $15 Data Plan — Verizon Wireless plans to introduce a less expensive, but restricted, data plan for smartphone customers next week, according to a person familiar with the matter, in a move that follows AT&T Inc.'s own capped offerings.

State of the Internet: Mobile Web's Explosive Growth — In 1999, it was the rapid growth of wired web services that was the top story. Fast-forward to today, and it is all about the massive and seemingly unstoppable growth of the mobile Internet that is all the rage.

Bezos-Backed Doxo Launches Paperless Billing Service — Doxo, a Seattle-based startup that has been operating in stealth since 2008, is finally showing off its paper-free service for billing and other mailings today. — Doxo is a single dashboard for managing all of the banks …

Tech industry waits for President Obama — They called him the first “tech president.” — But two years after they rallied behind his campaign and helped put him in the White House, technology industry executives give President Barack Obama mediocre reviews.

Sprint admits losing WiMax users early on — Officials say problems with spotty WiMax coverage have now been largely addressed by Sprint and Clearwire — Computerworld - CHICAGO — Sprint Nextel lost some potential customers due to spotty WiMax coverage in markets where it was first deployed, a Sprint official admitted Tuesday.

Drag and drop images in documents — When writing a document, it often helps to augment text with images and diagrams. Google documents already has three ways to add images: you can choose them from your hard-drive, add them by URL, and you can find them using Google Image Search.